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I've convinced myself that it's finally time to upgrade my old i3-2120 PC to something a little more powerful, and was considering buying a Ryzen cpu. My uses are primarily development (eclipse IDE, android studio) and infosec (running virtual machines and lots of tools), and of course also some gaming (but I'm not taking that into account for hardware). OS is Gentoo.
I'm trying to decide between the Ryzen 1600 or the 1700, the 1700 is about 80€ more expensive but more cores the better, especially when compiling. Is it correct that the CPU bugs in the early Ryzens have been dealt with by now?
What about RAM? I was considering 2x8GB Corsair Vengeance 2666MHz sticks, is it worthwhile paying a bit more to get 3200MHz RAM? Judging by random forum posts, people have trouble running their RAM at 3200MHz, especially when using dual-channel. Does the higher frequency even have a noticeable performance boost? The RAM I'm looking at is in the motherboard certified memory list.
Actually RAM is where my biggest doubt lies, initially I wanted to get a single stick of 16GB and then later plug in another, to finally be able to upgrade to 64GB in a few years. However, what's the chance that I'll be able to find the exact same model of RAM in 1-2 years time? I understand it has to be the same for dual-channel to work? Also, until I get the money to buy the second stick, I'd be running single-channel and get lower performance.
Regarding the motherboard, the Asus Prime B350-plus seems fine to me. I don't see any reason to go for the x360 chipset as I don't plan on overclocking (I live in a very hot country so the cooler the better). It seems many recommend the MSI B350 Mate board though, but I've always bought Asus boards and mostly had a good experience, though I'm not opposed to changing brands.
All other parts will carry over from my old build, the GPU is an Asus nVidia 660 (factory-OC'ed) so nothing particularly fast, but it's good enough for me for the foreseeable future. I'm aware it'll probably be the bottleneck in games though.
Any recommendations would be much appreciated :-)
For your kind of work and since you mentioned compiling, the 1700 is the better choice, it's worth those 80€. I'm running a 1700X and having 16 threads is a great multitasking pool. Technically most issues with 1st Gen Ryzen are gone, only one I'm currently aware of is the [soft freeze / lockup](https://community.amd.com/thread/225795) which freezes your system randomly, believe me it's far far less scary than it sounds and disabling the C6 state in Bios seems to prevent it from happening for many people, in a whole month I've had it maybe once? I repeat, it's far less scary than it sounds, else I'd already be planning for 2700X ;)
Motherboard wise, I'm running the Asus B350M-A, very similar to what you mentioned. Solid board so far, regular Bios updates, plenty of features.
Memory - I'm running 2x 8GB Sticks (G.Skill Ripjaws V) at 2800Mhz without issues (can't get it to run higher despite supporting 3200Mhz). System is fast and stable so I can't complain, honestly I didn't notice any difference in gaming / compiling from back when I used to run it at 2133Mhz. As for finding the same exact model as your own 1-2 years down the line, I think the answer to that is "it depends", luck and the right place at the right time determine that imo.
The thing about waiting is that I don't like buying brand new hardware, I'd rather wait a few months until the bugs have been dealt with and the dust has settled a bit. To me, the performance increase of the 2nd gen Ryzen doesn't seem worth waiting for.
I suppose I'll just get a single stick 16gb ram and then another in a few months.
Does disabling C6-states cause any performance decrease?
What ever you do do not buy one stick of ram it will drastically effect your performance. Ryzen needs the dual memory to perform correctly. Ryzen is really memory dependent. Get ram thats either the MB says is compatible with it. Or buy memory that is specific to Ryzen. If check on youtube you'll see people that have tested and show result diffidences of single channel and dual channel.
The first generation Ryzen seem quite stable now. Second gen based off the 2400G I messed with. (Which according to my call with AMD is using the 2nd gen cores.) Have some bugs. More noticeable on windows then on linux. The GPU part of the card their are no official drivers for Linux yet and frankly its buggy. (Not going to get into a list here.) Was bad enough that I had CPU exchanged and had the client buy a 1600 and a nvidia 1050 (Client does not video game.) Although found out on a side note that the GTX 1050 is a good low end gaming card if cant afford all the overpriced cards. Although I notice cards may be finally coming down in price.
So long story short getting a first gen CPU is not a bad idea, but one stick of ram is.
This allows me to expand to 32GB in the future without removing modules, I hope that'll still be enough in a few years time.
I've had one strange momentary freeze while playing Tides of Numenera, the computer would freeze for 5 seconds and when it worked again I had an error message for the Nvidia card in the log. Hardware, driver or kernel fault? I can't tell as it hasn't happened again.
Overall I'm super happy with the upgrade, the computer is so much faster now and takes everything I throw at it except compiling heavy packages on all 16 threads. I might have to compile those with -j8 instead until I can afford another 2x8GB memory kit.